Often, when people wonder if American higher education might follow the
fate of journalism, falling victim to inability to adapt to new technological
milieux, they are thinking in terms of money and its impact. The financial
structures of protected and centralized institutions can collapse when product
becomes cheaply and widely available, both for creation and consumption, even to
individuals with few skill-based assets. But the parallels extend further, into
a preceding erosion of the quality of the “products” each “industry” produces. It
was this erosion that set the stage for what was to follow for journalism, and
that is setting it now for education, and it stems in part from fears, in both
fields, that public opinion can adversely affect the income, the status, and
the prerogatives that had become so cherished by those in power.
Certainly, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first
century, once vigorous newspapers and colleges had become timid. Financial
success of unexpected and unequalled degree led first journalism and then
higher education into protectionist stances where the primary desire of the
institutions came to be maintenance of income and status, not improvement of
the product—a problem, of course, that many other industries have faced. As
happens so often to stagnant enterprises, the products of journalism and
education became, or will become, vulnerable to competition from unexpected
sources. But there is a difference between these institutions and industry in
general. At least one basic and critical function of each of these particular
institutions sets them apart from just about any other American institution or
industry, and that is their function in preparing people for their role as
citizens in the American democracy. This, not just ability to turn a profit
through new, possibly risky endeavour, has been atrophying.
One sure sign of timidity, providing a false sense of “objectivity”
through a reliance on “balance” instead of on evidence and on confidence in
one’s own ability to stake out and defend a position, can be seen today in both
journalism and education. This sign, often also manifest as an unwillingness to
step outside of “traditional” methodologies (hiding behind them, more
accurately), became more and more evident over the decades before the collapse
of journalism in the early years of the twenty-first century, with education
soon (and currently) following its example. It was, and is, best exemplified by
the withdrawal of willingness to take a public stand on any issue, except in
defined corners of either operation, and claiming a dispassionate “objectivity”
as the goal. The real reason for this, though, is that the stakes have become
so large, the rewards so great, that these institutions, and the individuals in
privileged positions within them, have reached the point where they are not
willing to do anything that might jeopardize the funding stream. The unspoken goal
of much of academic research is now primarily the continuation of funding, not
the solving of problems, scientific or otherwise. This attitude extends far
beyond the sciences: in all of education, as in journalism, the goal certainly
is no longer the creation of an educated citizenry, once a purported objective
of both. Certainly, the overriding goal of retention of income streams
precludes concentration on, or confidence in, anything outside of protection of
fiscal position. Necessarily, it precludes risk.
Ever since the money involved became enormous, journalism and academia
“players” have been reacting like winners at poker who have grown cautious after
amassing huge numbers of chips. While this may be judicious in a situation
where the sole goal is monetary gain, in realms dominated by creation of
product, especially ones that have taken on civic roles and responsibilities,
it leaves much to be desired. When the top becomes risk averse, also, the
attitude trickles down even to those like me operating in support positions,
who then find themselves taking little risk on their own, worried about the possibility
of offending superiors whose goal, now, has little directly to do with the
activities of us subordinates.
The timidity from the top reaches down into the methodologies of the
news story, for journalism, and the classroom, for higher education. Though
manifest in a variety of ways, it is easily seen in the tendency of retreat
toward false balance, a result of that unwillingness to risk taking a stand,
particularly on controversial topics but eventually, through imitative analogy,
in almost everything printed or taught. In journalism, this has led to the
opening that bloggers took advantage of, once developing technologies had
provided the tools. In higher education, it has not only helped open the door
for new “for profit” colleges willing to move into areas the older institutions
fear, but it has allowed those feeling shut out by extremely hierarchic and
code-bound institutions to sense an area of weakness—and to attack.
All sorts of justifications are put forward for the attempts to present what
is claimed as “detachment” or “objectivity” or “balance” in both venues, from a
sense of fairness to an odd re-conception of intellectual honesty. In many
cases, however, it is mostly, as I have written elsewhere, “indicative of a
complete lack of principle and an abundance of opportunism”[1] no matter
how well dressed up it is. I was paraphrasing a statement in a Washington, D.C.
newspaper, the U.S. Telegraph, on
October 7, 1828 attacking a new Baltimore paper’s claim that it would endeavour
towards neutrality of opinion. That older suspicion of “objectivity,”
unfortunately, was already dying, as the claims put forward by that new
Baltimore paper hint. Journalist and commentator on his field Davis “Buzz”
Merritt describes quite succinctly what has happened over the years since and
the attitudes that have developed as a result:
The dominance of scientific thought and methods sanctified the most
distanced observer as being the most reliable. Others attribute it to a crasser
impulse: the need of publishers in competitive situations to move away from
highly politicized, opinionated coverage so as to please a broader audience and
offend fewer advertisers…. Detachment, it is almost universally believed by
journalists, is the fount of their credibility…. The newspaper is separated
from other institutions by its duty to report on them…. If we maintain the
proper separations, then surely our product is pure and will be perceived as
such: its objectivity is insured and we therefore will have credibility.[2]
Following
journalism scholar Jay Rosen, Merritt refers to this as “separation fever,”[3] a false
belief that it is possible for the reporter to remove herself or himself so
completely from the story being covered that real “objective” reporting
results.
The pose of impartiality, however, reduces all
positions to “opinions,” and this creates problems not only in presentation in
journalism but in effective classroom learning and in public debate subsequent to reporting in the press and
education in the classroom, calcifying belief and making compromise (as we are
seeing in contemporary American politics) almost impossible. This, of course,
not only runs counter to the purported goals of the institutions, but it
actually subverts the very sorts of
discussions and compromises both journalism and education are supposed to
promote in a democracy. In an era of constant strife between foundationalists,
who believe in knowable “truth,” and pragmatists, for whom “truth” is little
more than “current understanding,” attempts to find “balance” inevitably tip
the scale instead, making the relativists look lame and lightweight, lacking
confidence in contrast to the solid certainties of the foundationalists. The
differences, as Michael Bérubé, writes (characterizing the faculty as, for
the most part, “liberals”), are stark:
In any standoff between secular
liberals and religious conservatives, then, each side will have a drastically
different conception not only of the issues at hand in the standoff but also of
the consequences of the dispute itself: the liberals believe that the religious
conservatives will craft social policies that will hurt gay men, atheists, and
rape victims, whereas the religious conservatives believe that a just and
omnipotent deity will consign the liberals to unending torment in hell, where
they belong. Surely you don’t have to be a secular liberal to see that, in this
game, the deck is stacked.[4]
Certainly, such situations rarely lead to compromise or attempts to
understand the viewpoint of the other.
The believers in “balance” set themselves as a third
camp, ignoring the irreconcilable differences between the other two. In fact,
they pretty much disregard them. They are, generally, those who see themselves
as neither foundationalists nor pragmatists but as “realists,” starting from
the claim that, as Richard Rorty puts it, “the only true source of evidence is
the world as it is in itself”[5] and from a
belief in the possibility of understanding the world without the intercession
of human bias and limitation—the underpinnings of any belief in objectivity. When
they think of them at all, they look down on the other two groups, the former
for seeing the world through belief, the latter for not believing in the “real”
world at all.
The arrogance and confidence of all of these attitudes, even the third,
is distinct from that of William James’s “most useful investigator” who “is
always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an
equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.”[6] This does
not necessarily translate into a lack of confidence or into an inability to go
onto the public stage and perform, as it were. Nor does such an attitude hide
belief behind a veneer of objectivity, nor worry about whether or not its base
is foundational. Instead, this one is a constant questioner, listener, and
evaluator, someone ever attempting to undercut her or his own assumptions and
even cherished beliefs—even while presenting to an audience. Unfortunately,
this investigator has almost completely disappeared from the American classroom,
just as it has in American journalism.
James does go on to extol “the dispassionately judicial intellect with no
pet hypothesis.”[7]
This “objective” position, though it is an impossibility or simply a theoretical
starting point, is what many journalists and educators claim to establish at
the end, a claim that foundationalists love to undermine, when journalists and
academics make it, easily showing both the claim’s arrogance and its falsity—and
its essential timidity when used as an excuse against “opinion.” It is this,
and the lack of confidence that it generally hides, that set journalism up for
its fall within the last decade—at least in part. And this, too, may prove to
be a factor in any coming downfall of the current American system of higher
education.
People such as David Horowitz, a right-wing activist and author of
(among many other books) The Professors:
The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, are finding it easy, today, to
hoist many scholars by their own petard, showing that their cherished
objectivity is no such thing. They use this as a tactic towards a strategic
design, the replacement of the current “liberal” establishment from its seat of
dominance within American universities with much more conservative leaders. As
Paul Starr, author of Creation of the
Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, wrote in a review of Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the
American University by Martin Anderson (quoted in Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?), “Mr. Anderson seems to
want to do for the universities what [Newt] Gingrich and his confrères have done
for the Congress: bring the institution into such disrepute that conservatives,
long stuck in minority status, will have a chance at gaining power.”[8] The strategy,
shared by Horowitz, hasn’t changed over the twenty years since Anderson’s book,
either in politics or against academia. As the ascent of Sarah Palin shows (not
to mention later permutations of the anti-politician politician such as Michele
Bachmann, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain), belief and personality now trump
knowledge and skill in the political arena—and even in journalism, where
entertainers such as Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Rush
Limbaugh hold greater influence than anyone who has made a career of studying
issues rather than audiences. Unless things change, this will soon be the case in
American universities as well. David Barton, a self-styled “historian” with a
clear and self-proclaimed “Christian” view of American history, is already more
influential than most with real training and experience in that field of study.
Bill O’Reilly has found as much success as serious popular historians as Ron
Chernow and David McCullough with the bestselling Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America
Forever (written with Martin Dugard), a work riddled with historical error
and examples of amateur scholarship. In a comment on the book, novelist Nelson DeMille
goes so far as to write, “Add historian to Bill O’Reilly’s already impressive
résumé.”[9] The term
“historian” is thereby reduced to equivalence with “entertainer,” with
accuracy, care, developed skill, and even peer approval jettisoned completely.
Disrepute indeed.
People within academia, including me, have allowed this to happen
through our own growing unwillingness to grapple with hard issues and to
publicly defend the positions we establish, especially if our positions
challenge our own institutions. Ira Shor, one of the rare American academics
who refuse to bow to the forces of inertia, complained of this more than
fifteen years ago though, in keeping with what seemed to be the case at the
time, he blamed political pressure instead of financial protectiveness:
A teacher’s authority to question
the status quo… varies with the changing tides of politics. Different eras have
different political climates, encouraging or repressing democratic activism. In
what I have called the “conservative restoration” following the activist
sixties—the reactionary period from Nixon through Gingrich—it became
increasingly harder for me to pursue experiments, as students, colleagues, and
administrators pulled in their sails, in tune with the declining social
movements and the rising reactionary politics of these decades.[10]
In the
mid-nineties, the financial imperatives stemming from the attitudes of the
Reagan era (speaking culturally and not simply politically) were not so starkly
apparent as they are today. The destructive impact of the synergy of politics
and money on journalism and education, certainly, was not yet quite so visible
as they have become, especially, since 9/11. They have even had an impact on
teachers as outspoken as Bérubé:
in the years since, as conservative students and pundits have begun to
mount campaigns against what they perceive as liberal “bias” in American
universities, I’ve had many occasions to wonder whether I’ve always dealt with
[conservative] students… in the best possible way. Although I’m a fairly
opinionated and outspoken liberal-progressive writer outside the classroom, I
keep most of my political opinions to myself when I enter the classroom, and
only very rarely do I encounter an undergraduate student who’s familiar with my
writings for Dissent or the Nation or major-city newspapers. Nor do
I pry into my students’ personal beliefs; ordinarily, I neither know nor care
where my students stand on abortion, the minimum wage, genocide in Rwanda or
Sudan, war in Iraq, the regressive Social Security tax, or the policies of the
World Bank.[11]
Though I do
much the same thing, I am beginning to believe I am wrong—not wrong to never
pry into student beliefs (Bérubé’s bringing that up shows the power that has
developed around the quest for “balance”) but wrong to leave my own beliefs,
for the most part, outside the classroom door. I would be a stronger example to
my students if I met questions on such topics directly (which, I suspect, is
how Bérubé actually approaches things), instead of avoiding them by saying
something like “That’s not really relevant to the topic under consideration.” Doing
so only makes me look weak and makes it harder for my students to learn. Why? Because
questions that might lead to debate, that might spark interest, are thereby
shown to be easily shunted aside. Good education focuses as much on attitude as
on topics. At the very least, if we force attitude aside, we leave education
dull.
In addition to weakening the institutions of journalism and higher
education and reducing the likelihood of compromise in political debate, the
quest for “objectivity” has also weakened, within universities, any defence of
academic freedom. After all, academic freedom is a freedom for teachers, not
simply for scholars, one necessitated by the role of professor as exemplar, as
one both willing to take a stand and also to doubt it—and to invite students to
do the same. So important is this to academic freedom that the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP), in the 1915 Declaration of
Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, addresses teaching
directly: “Academic freedom in this sense comprises
three elements: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the
university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.”[12] The
Declaration goes on, reflecting early recognition of the problems that
financial success for educational institutions can entail, but that were not yet
generally a controlling part of academia:
If education is the cornerstone of
the structure of society and if progress in scientific knowledge is essential
to civilization, few things can be more important than to enhance the dignity
of the scholar’s profession, with a view to attracting into its ranks men of
the highest ability, of sound learning, and of strong and independent
character. This is the more essential because the pecuniary emoluments of the
profession are not, and doubtless never will be, equal to those open to the
more successful members of other professions. It is not, in our opinion,
desirable that men should be drawn into this profession by the magnitude of the
economic rewards which it offers; but it is for this reason the more needful that
men of high gift and character should be drawn into it by the assurance of an
honorable and secure position, and of freedom to perform honestly and according
to their own consciences the distinctive and important function which the
nature of the profession lays upon them.[13]
As Shor indicates, the status of all teachers,
including university professors, has been diminished over the past generation
in a climate that has become distinctly anti-intellectual. No longer are
professors accepted as authorities, certainly not with the enthusiasm of the
past when college professors could be popular local lecturers. In part because
they have not defended their positions (it is too easy to blame the public
alone), professors have lost status to the point where lightweights like Barton
and O’Reilly can easily challenge their place of authority within the public
imagination. The timidity brought about by fear of losing funding, a timidity
academic freedom was supposed to
protect against, has combined with fundamentalist and conservative distrust of
the universities (especially strong, coming off of the role of universities as
hosts to sixties leftist movements) to create a situation where anti-intellectual
momentum becomes nearly impossible to counter.
Showing that, even a century ago, the members of the
AAUP understood the dangers of money, at least, in an academic environment, the
Declaration is used to try to establish a firewall between the financial needs
of the educational institution and its scholarly and educational needs:
In the political, social, and economic field
almost every question, no matter how large and general it at first appears, is
more or less affected by private or class interests; and, as the governing body
of a university is naturally made up of men who through their standing and
ability are personally interested in great private enterprises, the points of
possible conflict are numberless. When to this is added the consideration that
benefactors, as well as most of the parents who send their children to
privately endowed institutions, themselves belong to the more prosperous and
therefore usually to the more conservative classes, it is apparent that, so
long as effectual safeguards for academic freedom are not established, there is
a real danger that pressure from vested interests may, sometimes deliberately
and sometimes unconsciously, sometimes openly and sometimes subtly and in
obscure ways, be brought to bear upon academic authorities.[14]
The Declaration goes on to describe problems that
public universities might have, different from those of the private schools in
that the funding source is the government, to a large degree, but still
parallel in that both instances require the protection of the faculty through
academic freedom as an explicit aspect of a successful university. In both
cases, academic freedom is meant to provide a barrier against the influence of
both money and public opinion:
The tendency of modern democracy is for men to
think alike, to feel alike, and to speak alike. Any departure from the
conventional standards is apt to be regarded with suspicion. Public opinion is
at once the chief safeguard of a democracy, and the chief menace to the real
liberty of the individual. It almost seems as if the danger of despotism cannot
be wholly averted under any form of government. In a political autocracy there
is no effective public opinion, and all are subject to the tyranny of the
ruler; in a democracy there is political freedom, but there is likely to be a
tyranny of public opinion.
An inviolable refuge from such
tyranny should be found in the university.[15]
It
still could be such a refuge, were academics willing to protect their
reputations and show their strengths by standing their ground in the classroom
and in public debate. Instead, when attacked, today they tend to fall into a
defensive, protectionist posture, one that makes them appear weak. One that
invites attack. When coupled with negative public perception of other aspects
of academia, including tenure, this makes many people see the professor’s
position as little more than a sinecure.
It is no wonder that the profession has fallen into
such low repute. The “public intellectual,” the academic playing the role of
advising authority in the public sphere, almost disappears as a result of the
deliberate attack on the professors and of our inability to defend ourselves. We
rarely do what the effective teacher, the one who can lead in the classroom by
example, does, in part because we do not maintain the respect the professor had
once earned within the wider community, to say nothing of the classroom.
“Teaching by example,” once one of the most important
aspects of what occurred in colleges, includes showing what it means to take a
position, understand it well enough to defend it, and to stand by it in the
public sphere. And, just as importantly, to publicly change one’s position when
shown its errors. The crumbling of support for academic freedom over the past
few years stems, at least in part, from the inability of so many of us
professors, like so many journalists, to take courageous public stands on
issues and to demonstrate an intellectual ability to change one’s mind in the
face of new evidence. It has led an increasingly timid profession to back away
from its own responsibilities within the citizenry. At the same time, emphasis
on impartiality has provided cover for other fears, such as the one Horowitz
and others on the right perceive and use in their attacks on academia, fears of
the professoriate being perceived by the wider public as composed of propagandists
instead of scholars.
In “My Pedagogic Creed,” John Dewey wrote: “I believe,
finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals,
but in the formation of the proper social life.”[16] Taken
seriously, this leads teachers to model for their students, to show how one
ought to act in the public arena of a democracy. It means that “teaching” must
be much more than simply providing a conduit for “content.” By withdrawing from
this responsibility under the cover of impartiality, academics have opened
themselves up to the charge that, given new technological means of obtaining
information and even of developing skills, their services are no longer needed.
Furthermore, they continue to create easy openings for attack from the right. Assuming
(they do it for this argument only) that all stands are opinions only, certain
conservative forces attack syllabi as one-sided if, for instance, creationism
is not offered as an alternative to evolution or doubts about climate change
are not given equal weight in the classroom to evidence for it. This is crazy,
for it teaches students that no opinion is better than any other, an attitude
that will make them less than prepared to deal with the questions the future
will certainly raise. Dewey writes:
With the advent of democracy and
modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what
civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare
the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life
means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will
have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and
hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of
grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be
trained to act economically and efficiently.[17]
Accepting
“balance,” students can never next grasp the essentials for reasoning, for any
one idea is considered as good as the next, making the act of reasoning
irrelevant:
I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational
processes) also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control
of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective
action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment,
without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the
fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a
result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in
mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort;
presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas
imposed from without.[18]
In the news media, a consistent stance, rather than
reasoning, has become a commentator’s stock-in-trade. In news entertainment,
which is the largest part of journalism today, changing one’s point of view
merely confuses audiences and creates problems for those responsible for
booking guests on television and radio shows where the intent is often to
feature competing opinions as the basis for the conflicts that drive the shows.
As a result, most anyone whose views evolve will eventually drop from sight,
for they cannot be guaranteed to provide entertaining opposition. The attitude
that one must be consistent in opinions is now carried over to an unprecedented
degree to politicians, who are pilloried if they change their minds on any
issue. Because they have not publicly held themselves as models for how and why
attitudes can change (not recently, at least), college professors are seen in
the same light. That, their attackers conclude, they should not have opinions
at all but should be “objective”—and should stick to “content” alone.
An opinionated faculty, however, is part of what has
made American education effective. The radical behaviourist B. F. Skinner once
told me how rhetorician I. A. Richards would introduce him during his annual
visits to Richards’ classes at Harvard: “And now I introduce… the devil!” Skinner
laughed, enjoying the recollection—and the fact that two men who disagreed
dramatically could both be friends and listen to the other—and even allow the
other to put forward his own views to his classes.
These two weren’t interested in “balance,” but in
debate and continued learning. Each fervently believed in his own theories, but
each was willing to be challenged. Each was confident in his position but open
to be proven wrong. Each was modelling for students an attitude towards
learning and towards intellectual discussion of a sort that the quest for
“balance” has helped to erode over the decades since their heyday.
How is what they were providing different than what
the political right wants, when it asks that creationism and climate-change
doubt be included in the classroom? Simply this: Skinner and Richards were
opinionated and proud of it; they did not, however, hold “opinion” itself in
high regard. Instead, they valued support of a position, confidence in one’s
ability to consider and evaluate evidence, and a willingness to take into
account new information. They could do this because they knew they were
protected by the principle of academic freedom. Even when their opinions were
at odds with prevailing cultural winds, they were protected—not as people who
will imbue certain beliefs into the students (it was expected that family and
culture could take care of that) but as exemplars of the process of search, conclusion,
and action. But academic freedom has itself atrophied, becoming little more
than job protection—a right and not a responsibility.
Skinner remains one of the most significant cases in
point for the value of traditional academic freedom, especially for those whose
beliefs run counter to prevailing cultural winds. Long vilified for,
supposedly, raising his daughters in a Skinner box, for hating ‘freedom and
dignity,’ and for reducing every human action to stimulus and response, he is
now recognized (though not yet fully) as a visionary. The ‘Air-Crib’ he
developed and wrote about in an unfortunately titled article (“Baby in a Box”:
in a note in Cumulative Record,
Skinner claims he did not create the title[19]) for Ladies Home Journal in 1945, foresaw
such household commonalities as monitors in cribs that allow parents to hear a
child’s breathing and activity from anywhere in the house. It was not the
operant chamber, or Skinner box, that was used to teach generations of students
about operant conditioning. And, though it took a generation for his book Verbal Behavior to recover from a
scathing review by Noam Chomsky (Skinner would later say to me that he had
never responded to Chomsky because Chomsky’s review did not deal with the
points of the book but with Chomsky’s own vision of a type of behaviourism,
often called ‘methodological behaviourism,’ that was not Skinner’s), it is now
of increasing importance to the study of language usage. Finally, Skinner’s take
on technology in education, though still mostly ignored today, probably should
become the starting point for development of effective “hybrid” (combined
classroom and online) education. His words on the subject more than fifty years
ago certainly remain relevant today:
There is more important work to be done—in which
the teacher’s relations to the pupil cannot be duplicated by a mechanical
device. Instrumental help would merely improve these relations. One might say
that the main trouble with education… is that the child is obviously not
competent and knows it and that the
teacher is unable to do anything about it and knows that too. If the advances which have recently been made in
our control of behavior can give the child genuine competence in reading,
writing, spelling, and arithmetic, then the teacher may begin to function, not
in lieu of a cheap machine, but through intellectual, cultural, and emotional
contacts of that distinctive sort which testify to her status as a human being.[20]
This,
of course, is the most important role a teacher plays. But it is also the one
that, through timidity, we have been giving up. We have, in fact, been allowing
measurement and “outcome” to replace teaching in almost all of American
national discussions on education: “under the blandishments of statistical
methods, which promised a new kind of rigor, educational psychologists spent
half a century measuring the results of teaching while neglecting teaching
itself.”[21] Now, it
has been a century.
The result? A system of education that, all too often,
takes engagement out of education, replacing it with boredom:
Though physically present and looking at a
teacher or text, the student does not pay attention. He is hysterically deaf. His
mind wanders. He daydreams. Incipient forms of escape appear as restlessness. “Mental
fatigue” is usually not a state of exhaustion but an uncontrollable disposition
to escape, and schools deal with it by permitting escaped to other activities
which, it is hoped, will also be profitable…. A child will spend hours absorbed
in play or in watching movies or television who cannot sit still in school for
more than a few minutes before escape becomes too strong to be denied.[22]
By
college, the disengagement between student and teacher becomes almost complete,
the courses following an “almost universal system of ‘assign and test.’ The
teacher does not teach, he simply holds the student responsible for learning. The
student must read books, study texts, perform experiments, and attend lectures,
and he is responsible for doing so in the sense that, if he does not correctly
report what he has seen, heard, or read, he will suffer aversive consequences.”[23] Yet it
is through interaction with teachers that a student really learns:
It has been said that an education
is what survives when a man has forgotten all he has been taught. Certainly few
students could pass their final examinations even a year or two after leaving
school or the university. What has been learned of permanent value must
therefore not be the facts and principles covered by examinations but certain
other kinds of behaviour often ascribed to special abilities.[24]
Those
other kinds of behaviour include actions such as continued search even in the
face of failure, change of direction in light of new information, and
engagement with others pursuing intellectual goals. These are gained, usually,
through interaction with real scholar/teachers and through notice of the
examples set.
The reasons education fell into the timidity of
“objectivity,” while sharing an essential protective component with journalism,
are somewhat different. Those of journalism are explored by a number of
scholars and journalists, including Rosen (What
Are Journalists For?) and Merritt (Public
Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News Is Not Enough). Those of
education have not been as well explored.
Unfortunately, a certain portion of the blame for what
has happened in higher education can be laid to a misapplication (and often a
misunderstanding) of one book, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, Freire describes ‘the banking
model of education,’ something that has become the bête noire of many educators
and an excuse, couched in leftist terms, for removing oneself from
responsibility in the classroom and from the engagement Skinner promotes. Freire
argues that the contents of courses, through this banking model (which is more
talked of and vilified than understood), tend “to become lifeless and petrified.”[25] It
turns students “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the
teacher.”[26] Freire
sees the solution to the tendency to fall into this pattern in development of a
paradigm where all in the classroom act both as teachers and as students. It
removes the lectern, so to speak, making everyone involved explicit learners. He
writes:
The capability of banking education
to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their
credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the
world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their
“humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost
instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical
faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks
out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.[27]
The
irony, today, is that Freire’s own suggestions have been turned to that same
preservation. Adapted into a situation that cannot maintain it honestly,
Freire’s own model of education simply becomes another means of protecting the
status quo. What Freire envisioned was a complete revamping of the system of
education, including its hierarchies. It is impossible, for instance, to
institute a real community of equal learners when one member of the community
is invested with the necessity of evaluating all of the others and when that one
has been selected for membership in an elite fraternity. Shor, who collaborated
with Freire on later projects, recognized this, writing that, “in terms of
transforming undemocratic power relations, I cannot instantly shed or deny the
authority I bring to class. Many students won’t allow that. They expect me to
install unilateral authority; in some ways, they prefer it or want it, more
than just expect it.”[28] Grafting
Freire onto an unchanged hierarchy cannot work. More has to be done. Yet a
flawed and bastardized version of Freire’s pedagogy, taking none of this into
account, has become the unquestioned standard for too much of contemporary
classroom teaching, at least in the humanities.
Small groups, short activities, sitting in a circle:
these have become the core of any acceptable teaching in more and more eyes and
are enforced through peer classroom evaluations. Lecturing is out. People extol
‘the guide by the side’ and bemoaned ‘the sage on the stage.’ But teaching is
much more than that, as Shor says. As Bérubé does, like Freire himself did, and Dewey and Skinner.
These are (or were) all real teachers, not people satisfied with a restrictive
methodology coupled with a timid approach to their topics or the world. Freire
argues that teachers should be as much learners as students, but never meant
that to reduce teachers—he meant to enhance learners and teachers by emphasizing the contribution learning makes to
teaching and that teachers constantly learn about teaching through their
students. Following that line of thought, Shor writes, “critical pedagogy is a
constantly evolving process which calls for continual change and growth, in me
and the students.[29]
Taking inspiration from Skinner, psychologist Fred
Keller wrote an article, published in 1968, called “Good-bye, Teacher.” It
wasn’t, as it might sound, an argument for ridding schools of their instructors
but a presentation of a plan expanding what is done in our schools. Use
technology, yes, but not solely; use teachers, but not alone and not in the
traditional fashion, focusing their energy on organization, motivation, and
example. Take things in small steps, students sometimes working alone,
sometimes with classroom peers who have already mastered the assignment,
sometimes with former students of the course now acting as proctors, making
everyone in the classroom clearly teachers to some degree. Called the
Personalized System of Instruction or the Keller Method, it actually works—but
it requires extra effort on the part of the teacher, far more than does
assigning tasks to small groups, keeping activities short, and letting students
talk in a circle. It requires planning and also requires confidence on the part
of the teacher, confidence that the traditional classroom role can be given up
without loss of authority.
Shor writes that students are “talked at, talked
about, talked around, and talked down to, but rarely talked with in traditional schooling.[30] Keller
wanted to change this as much as Freire did (both of them developed their
methods in Brazil in the early 1960s). This cannot be done through halfway
measures where students are not given the full picture of the teacher’s role or
when parts of what can make up effective teaching are utilized without the
rest, as Skinner makes clear by saying that technology in education is not, by
itself, enough.
Whatever the method used, education will never regain
its strength it we do not actively pursue the school’s participation within the
culture as a tool for improvement—not just of individuals but of the society as
a whole. We teachers need to be aggressive in our agendas, and those need to
extend well beyond the classroom. Dewey writes:
I believe it is the business of every one interested in education to
insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social
progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the
school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with
sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.[31]
This is not
objectivity—but it is education.
[1]
Aaron Barlow,
The rise of
the blogosphere (Westport,
Conn: Praeger. 2007), 61.
[2]
Davis Merritt, Public
journalism and public life: why telling the news is not enough (Mahwah, N.J.:
Erlbaum, 1998), 23-24.
[4]
Michael Bérubé, 2006. What's
liberal about the liberal arts?: classroom politics and "bias" in
higher education (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 289.
[5]
Richard Rorty, 1999. Philosophy
and social hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999),
150.
[6]
William James, “The Will to
Believe,” in The will to believe, and other essays in popular philosophy
(New York: Dover Publications, 1956),
21.
[8]
Bérubé, op. cit., 277.
[10]
Ira
Shor, 1996. When students have power: negotiating authority in a critical
pedagogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
25.
[11]
Bérubé, op. cit., 2-3.
[19]
B F Skinner,. Cummulative Record: A Selection of Papers (New York:
Appleton, Century-Crofts, 1972),
427.
[20]
Ibid., “The Technology of Education,”
156-157.
[21]
B. F. Skinner, The
technology of teaching (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 94.
[24]
B. F. Skinner, 1965.
“Review Lecture: The Technology of Teaching” (London: Proceedings of the Royal Society B.1965),
441-442.
[25]
Paulo Freire,
2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000),
7.
